1998 Free Software Award

Larry Wall won the Free Software Foundation Award 1998 for the Advancement
of Free Software for his many contributions to the advancement of
freely distributed software, most notably Perl, a robust scripting
language for sophisticated text manipulation and system management.
His other widely-used programs include rn (news reader), patch
(development and distribution tool), metaconfig (a program that writes
Configure scripts), and the Warp space-war game.

… Perl, a tool that takes the Unix ideas of
flexibility and portability further than almost any program before
it.

Larry Wall has always promoted keeping his
implementations free for all to study, enhance, and build on, without
restrictions, and the freedom for all to benefit in whatever ways they
can from his products.

In choosing the winner, we looked for a person who has made a great
contribution to the progress and development
of free software, through
activities that accord with the spirit of free software.

Any kind of activity could be eligible—writing software, writing
documentation, publishing CDs, even journalism—but whatever the
activity, we wanted to recognize long-term central contributions to
the development of the world of free software. “Accord with the
spirit” means, for example, that software, manuals or
collections of them (on tape or CD) must be entirely free. (That's
free as in freedom; selling
copies of free software for money is legitimate and would not
disqualify someone from the award.) Work done commercially was
eligible, but we want to give awards to individuals, not companies.

People such as Richard Stallman and Linus Torvalds, who have already
received other awards for their contributions, were not eligible for
the Free Software Award.

The awards committee considered nominations and decided who would
receive the award. The committee's members were Peter Salus
(Chairman), Scott Christley, Rich Morin, Adam Richter, Richard
Stallman, and Vernor Vinge.

Tudor Hulubei has submitted the following pictures taken at the event: